Storage Area Networks (SANs)

Understanding the data requirements of the storage system is necessary for a successful deployment. Increasingly, SANs are being deployed so that the storage is independent of the servers used in conjunction with it. Deploying SANs can represent a decrease in the time to recover from a non-functional server as the machine can be replaced without having to relocate the storage drives.

Use these questions to evaluate if your deployment storage requirements would be best served through a SAN:

• Are reads or writes more prevalent?

• Do you need high I/O rate storage? Is striping the best option?

• Do you need high uptime? Is mirroring the best option?

• How is the data to be backed up? When is it going to be backed up?